Just a friendly reminder that this Thursday is the second Thursday of the month and we will be meeting at Cafe Colonnade downtown.

Cafe Colonnade is located at the corner of Metcalfe and Gilmore. If you need better directions, click on the “Meeting Information” link under the top graphic.

Official start time: 18:00 (unofficial – whenever you get there)
Official end time: 20:00 (people usually start drifting at 19:00 unless they are engaged in a conversation)

Topics:

Commentary on BSDCan 2012? I know a number of us were there. Anything we really liked/disliked about the conference? I’m sure Dan would like some feedback from the local group.

I’ll be bringing along a stack of DVDs for the x86-64 bit versions of PC-BSD 9.0, FreeNAS 8.04 -p1 (release), and FreeNAS 8.2 beta to hand out if anyone is interested. These were provided by iX systems (the sponsors of PC-BSD and FreeNAS)

I’ll be talking about an upcoming open source festival in October, the venue of which is not decided yet, but the planning is underway. More details at the meeting.

We should have another install fest. I’m thinking we could use it to write up some easy to follow HOWTOs on creating a bootable USB stick without using windows, network based installs (local LAN repository vs. internet connection), etc. a cookbook approach vs. a long winded article. Perhaps a FreeBSD installation for the impatient article?

NetBSD – is anyone using it in the group? I’m sure a number of us have oddball hardware sitting around and probably would benefit from installing it. I know I have an old Cobalt Raq2 MIPS based machine and a couple of arm based netwinders. Are these machines even relevant any more?

How about OpenBSD? I’m considering revamping one of my web servers to use OpenBSD. I haven’t actually run it on anything other than a test install. Any hidden gotchas like the extra config you need to do with selinux to make it useful and secure?

We will be mixing our meeting with the Ottawa Science Fiction Society (http://www.ottawasfs.ca), so there will be some new faces at the table. This could bring about some interesting topics.